


Broken Pieces (Solving a Puzzle)

by Sanctuaria



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexuality because Pride, Daisy and May heart-to-heart, Dekesy, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, First Kiss, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I have no explanation for this guys I really don't, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, JUST LET THEM BE HAPPY, Kinda, LemonQuake, Lemons, Past StaticQuake, Period-Typical Racism, Season/Series 05, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, and Alphonso my-girlfriend-just-tricked-me-and-locked-me-in-a-cell Mackenzie, and because I wanted to, as respectful as possible to Daisy’s feelings for Lincoln while still being Deke/Daisy, but the Deke kind not the fandom term, mama may, philindaisy, relationship advice from Phil I’m-incapable-of-letting-people-take-care-of-me Coulson, when May is the most emotionally capable you know it’s a problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24828277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: Unloveable.All her life she’s thought it meantunable to be loved, but now she knows it’s something entirely different. Skye or Daisy or whoever she is now is a person whoshouldn’t be loved, because few enough people want to anyway and anyone who’s ever tried it has ended up dead. So she closes up that part of herself, locks it down and runs away from S.H.I.E.L.D. and anyone else who might get hurt by association with Daisy Johnson.It’s safer for everyone that way.(A.K.A. The Daisy/Deke Soul-mark AU that absolutely no one asked for, but I wrote anyway because the circumstances of their first meeting just fit it so, so well.)
Relationships: Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie/Yo Yo Rodriguez (background), Deke Shaw/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons (Background), Past Lincoln Campbell/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Phil Coulson/Melinda May (background)
Comments: 59
Kudos: 102
Collections: fill the daisy/deke tag with actual content 2020





	Broken Pieces (Solving a Puzzle)

**Author's Note:**

> Okay guys I swear I don't even ship them this hard in canon, but my brain started writing this by itself while I was trying to sleep a few days ago and would not leave it alone, so here it is. I expected it to come out to about 2k words. 
> 
> I expected wrong. 
> 
> Contains a few minor tweaks from canon to make the story flow better, the biggest one being that Lincoln's first girlfriend actually died, but other than that mostly sticks to season 5 as we know it. Enjoy!

Born on a hot, muggy day on July 2nd, 1988 in the Hunan Province, Daisy Johnson is not born with a soul-mark. This does not bother Jiaying, who has the words “不好意思，你会说英语吗? — Excuse me, please, do you speak English?” black and bold in a nearly illegible doctor’s script along her sternum, and nor does it bother Cal, with “Yes, but you do not speak Chinese” along the base of his neck.

It doesn’t bother the nuns at St. Agnes at first either, or the first three foster families who take baby Mary Sue Poots home with them. One by one they return her for other reasons, until Mary Sue is five years old and the pinch-faced look the nuns give her when looking at her bare, unmarked body during a bath becomes a look she receives full-time. Prospective parents want to adopt kids with a mark and a promise of happiness for the future, even if it doesn’t always work out that way in reality. Even kids with two marks are swept up when they are small—a little deviant, to be sure, but there is nothing saying one can’t be platonic and one romantic. Problem solved.

But no mark, after five years? That’s not a chance most parents are willing to take.

“No wonder you’re unloveable,” Sister Penelope sniffs at seven-year-old Mary Sue, now self-titled “Skye,” as she wrestles the girl away from Aiden Matthews, six, who moments before called her a chink and stole her reading book during playtime and now is shrieking, blood streaming from his nose.

Alone in the time-out room, Skye tugs off her too-large clothes to look again, just to be sure. She even checks the hard-to-see spots, like the bottom of her feet and underneath her messy brown hair, but the nuns are right. There is no soulmate for Skye, no person predestined by the universe to want her or love her or fall _in_ love with her.

At thirteen, Skye decides maybe she is glad she is unmarked after all, as she watches her foster father beat his soulmate with a wooden bat in an alcohol-fueled rage before turning his anger on her. She’s just Skye, a girl the universe has no plans or caring for, and if she wants something, she’ll have to make her _own_ way.

And then there’s Miles.

Miles doesn’t have a mark either, and that is what first attracts her to him. They are both misfits, both a little broken and a lot messed up, and both not quite deluded enough to think what stretches between them is love, even if they play at it anyway. It’s also why Skye, despite one misstep, finds it so easy to leave him and the Rising Tide behind when offered a second chance.

A chance to join S.H.I.E.L.D.

Phil Coulson has two marks, though Skye of course doesn’t find out this until much later. One from Audrey, pretty script curling around his bicep, and one from May, simple and elegant and to the point, twisting around his ankle. May also has two, Andrew’s along the ring finger of her left hand and Coulson’s neat script above her heart. Both of them treat the latter as platonic until things become decidedly platon- _ish_ somewhere between a bottle of Haig and getting swept away to the future by a time-traversing space rock.

Fitz and Simmons, of course, have one, each other’s words from their first meeting at the Academy inscribed in small letters at the base of their palms, brought together whenever they high-five over a new piece of technology or another scientific discovery that will push the boundaries of their field. How they ever thought—for _years_ —that their marks were platonic, Skye will never understand, but they too eventually figure it out, even if it takes another monolith and a bloody space astronaut to get there.

(As for Ward, Skye doesn’t know what marks he may or may not have had, and is thankful she never ended up getting close enough to find out.)

Skye is still markless when she joins, forever markless at this point given her age of twenty-four, but this is the real adult world and even if any of them know, it doesn’t bother them. Coulson takes her under his wing, and then May does too, and for a time Skye thinks maybe that’s enough.

Until Lincoln.

_Lincoln_.

Lincoln has a mark. Daisy first sees it when he’s shirtless in the gym, quickly averting her gaze before he can see she’s looking. Still, she sees enough to realize it’s not gray, like he hasn’t met the person yet, and it’s not black either, but a pearly white that is nearly invisible against his skin.

(“I killed her,” Lincoln tells her eventually, his voice trembling and his face in his hands outside James’s shack in the middle of nowhere. “Most Inhumans have this feeling where nothing feels right, just empty inside, you know? Me, I tried to fill it with vodka, but I couldn’t control it…the drinking or my temper. We ended up wrapped around a telephone pole, and it was my fault.” The pain in his eyes is palpable. “All my fault.”)

With Lincoln, she first begins to believe it can be different. It’s not because his soulmate is dead, exactly, but he shares that indescribable ache deep inside her—the fear of never belonging, of never being enough, of having found something only for it to ripped away. She enjoys the push and the pull, the feeling of something electric—no pun intended—between them, the way she can whisper to him things she’s never dared tell anyone else and find no judgment in his blue eyes. Lincoln is warm laughter and unwavering loyalty, witty comebacks and shy smiles, and he likes her for who she is, which might be best of all.

And then Hive happens.

(The headset crackles. His voice, the strain in it. His blood, still on her hands. “Come to think of it, I just did. I mean, I tried, and we didn’t even realize it. A moment ago. The first time I said I lo—”)

Unloveable. All her life she’s thought it meant unable to be loved, but now she knows it’s something entirely different. Skye or Daisy or whoever she is now is a person who _shouldn’t be loved_ , because few enough people want to anyway and anyone who’s ever tried it has ended up dead. So she closes up that part of herself, locks it down and runs away from S.H.I.E.L.D. and anyone else who might get hurt by association with Daisy Johnson. And when that doesn’t work and she’s dragged back in for a man with a flaming skull and robot lookalike replacements of her team and dismantling a virtual fascist state, well…

She still resolves never to get that close to anyone again. It’s safer for everyone that way.

* * *

Deke Shaw has had gray words written in a simple, hurried script on his collarbone for as long as he can remember. Since birth, his mother tells him, and he knows enough from her stories about the old days to know that that means his soulmate is older than him, that as soon as he was born his own words would have appeared, gray and blocky, somewhere on their skin.

“Just like Nana and Bobo,” she tells him as she puts him to bed for the night, his hands scented orange for the last few remaining hours of his eighth birthday. “Someone out there’s waiting to meet you, Deke. And it’ll be perfect.”

“But I want to meet her now,” Deke says, pulling the ratty blanket a little closer to his chin. Little does he know how much stronger and more acute that feeling will get, once he _truly_ knows what it means to be alone.

His mom smiles, and kisses him on the forehead. “She’s on her way already, and you’re on yours. The steps you take don’t have to be big—”

“—they just have to take you in the right direction,” he finishes, snuggling down and closing his eyes.

Soul-marks. Few enough people have them now, some side effect of the sterilization pellets, so in a way he is lucky, with a promise from the universe etched on his collarbone. He waits for whoever it is who will finally come up to him and ask him for help.

And waits.

(Somewhere in there, his mom dies, made a Vacancy by the Blues for her knowledge and her stories.)

And waits.

(Somewhere in there, his dad takes up her work, and he becomes roach-food too.)

And waits.

He’s thirty-one, and he hasn’t found them yet, but he has learned not to put so much stock in such things. Prophecies of saviors from the future. Little gray words written close to his neck. The population of the Lighthouse isn’t that big, of course, and early on Deke makes a point of getting to meet everyone he can, both as a business opportunity—filling space at the Gallery is always the best way to earn a few extra tokens—and as a means to search for them, whoever that special person might be. But what little hope was left in the Lighthouse dwindles with each death. Survival, not this fairytale, is the most important.

Until—

Until.

“Wait,” the woman demands, holding up her hands to stop him in his tracks. Dark, slightly curled hair frames her face in soft waves, and in another circumstance, Deke might have even thought her pretty, but he just talked her and her annoying, ungrateful compatriots out of certain death at great risk of his own, so he has bigger things to worry about. The indignation and affront are clear in her voice. “Wait, we need your help. We need to find our friends.”

He stares at her. Deke can’t help it. He stares.

Because this is her. The one he’s been waiting for, that he was beginning to think never existed in the first place. His mom and dad and everyone else he could ever call family may be gone, but the universe is finally ponying up on at least one of its promises. His next words are timeless, fixed, already decided by some power higher than him—already painted somewhere on her skin, waiting for him to say them.

“Your friends…” he swallows, trying to get his thoughts together, trying to answer her question. It’s only, in every scenario for this moment that he’s dreamt of over his lifetime… Well, he really thought he’d be able to say ‘yes.’ “Your friends attacked a Kreeper. They’re as good as gone.” Once his reply is finished, he waits for the spark, the realization, the mutual recognition that something momentous has just occurred. The woman’s expression doesn’t change. “…Those Blues are bred to kill, so you’d best just make your peace with it.” Still, nothing.

“We’ll take our chances,” says the older man behind him, and then he’s getting pinned to the wall using the technology of his own belt buckle by the woman whose metric he installed, and his supposed soulmate is striding away to face off against two armed Kree, alone, soon to be dead or locked up and as good as.

He should have known. This is what any Shaw gets for trusting the universe.

* * *

Daisy doesn’t notice it, well, for days. Not until she’s been dragged into a prep room by freaky-blue-bitch Sinara still stroking her murder balls and directed to bathe and change before her Hunger Games-esque deathmatch so she can be shown off to the bidders. Kasius only sells slaves that are clean and fragrant, apparently. Still, she hasn’t had the chance since they arrived in the Lighthouse, so she takes it, stripping and lowering herself into the silky, scented water when she catches sight of it on the inner skin of her right arm.

No, she thinks, her eyes blurring before she can even read the words. It’s not possible.

It’s not possible. She’s unloveable.

She scrubs at it with her palm, with her nails, but the little black marks remain imprinted there as her breaths come quick and fast. Who can it be? Who has she met? Deke and Tess and Ben, but Ben is dead already, so it can’t be him—God, she hopes it’s Tess—

_Your friends…your friends attacked a   
_ _Kreeper. They’re as good as gone._

Deke Shaw.

Daisy shuts her eyes so she can no longer see the words etched irrevocably on her skin. She can’t deal with this right now. She’s about to fight to the death, she might be the Destroyer of Worlds, and she can’t deal with this right now.

Or maybe ever.

( _Lincoln_.)

* * *

Somehow, the woman who spoke the words of his soul-mark doesn’t die. And, possibly worse, she’s Daisy Johnson, Quake, Destroyer of Worlds? And, definitely worse, he somehow ended up sacrificing his life to get her and her friends home safely?

(He also might’ve—briefly—sold her into slavery to Kasius, which to be fair is a crappy-ass thing to do to a soulmate or anyone, really, but they were being naive and stupid and putting what few friends he had left in danger, so— Either way, the noble sacrifice thing absolves him. Hopefully.)

Except he doesn’t die either. He doesn’t die, and he finds himself in a park, next to a road, next to a small branchy-thing held up by two additional sticks. He ends up in a world with ice cream abundant enough to be thrown still frozen into the trash—or that has ice cream in general, because his world certainly didn’t—and cheeseburgers and onion rings and television and darts and _Zima_.

Even if his soulmate will never fall in love with him, or maybe even tolerate him, this is his consolation prize. She wasn’t acting, when he said those words that were supposed to change everything and upend his entire measly life. Deke’s an excellent actor with the ability to lie his way out of anything, and he knows her non-reaction was genuine. She had nothing to react to. He’s heard of times like this, where one person as a mark and the other doesn’t; he just never thought after all that longing and waiting it would happen to _him_. But he’s Deke Shaw, consummate survivor, the one who makes it out against all odds time and again, so he’ll take his consolation prize and run with it, as far as he can, and—

And end up in jail.

“How do you show up in another time and, like, immediately get arrested?” Daisy hisses at him through the bars of his cell. Unfortunately, the Zima has done a number on his brain, and Daisy’s just…beautiful? How has he never thought this before? Her hair, dark and soft, and did it get longer than when he last saw her? Her eyes, glaring at him even as she talks the mean uniformed men in circles with a practiced grace he recognizes and respects, getting in subtle jabs at him all the while—

_“I mean, how much time do you have, sir? Complex neurological deficiencies, low…low I.Q., poor motor skills…”_

_“Oh, he hasn’t…_ soiled himself _today yet, has he?”_

_“Saving the world? Imagine that.”_

Yeah. He’s a little bit in love.

She steers him out the door with a hand fisted in his collar, uncomfortably close to the where her words are painted on his skin, and doesn’t let him go until they’re at least three streets away from the squat brown building he was being held in, and even then, she doesn’t let him get more than a foot away from her as they hurry back to the Lighthouse, a tall, cylindrical white building that looks eerily like the picture on the postcard he used to look at as a child from the box of his mom’s things hidden under his bed. His buzz is fading but he can’t bring himself to care, out here in the sun and the trees with Daisy hurrying along beside him, ducking her head whenever they pass by another person as if afraid they’ll recognize her.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” he tells her as they approach, because he might’ve mentioned it in the jail cell but he just wants to be sure she knows how much he appreciates it, even if her coming to get him has brought him straight back to the Lighthouse, the place he’s been trapped all thirty-one years of his life.

(He probably should’ve thought that one through better, but too late now.)

Then May calls in, the woman who he’s just a little afraid might be still holding a grudge from pinning her to a wall and stabbing a metric through her wrist the first time they met, except her voice is tense and urgent and sets a terrified look on Daisy’s face. Then it is seeing the ex-Kree servant, Simmons, running through the base with a mangled, bloodied body on a stretcher, and the pale whiteness of Daisy’s face as she hurries for their plane. Deke bobs along in her wake, watching as she makes a beeline for Mack, a light tug on his arm all it takes before she is enveloping him in the warmest, purest hug Deke has seen since he was a child. Tears slip down the big guy’s face as she holds him tight, support and empathy radiating from her. Daisy’s crying too, and he witnesses for the first time how _deeply_ she feels the pain of others, and how deeply she cares for them in return.

Deke was wrong before. _This_ is when he falls a little bit in love with Daisy Johnson.

* * *

Telling her as much, however, is an entirely other matter altogether. For starters, she doesn’t seem to really…like him? As a person?

And yeah, he gets that. He really does. He’s out of time even if he’s not out of place, and he did rat-slash-sell her to Kasius (again, sorry, Daisy) not too long ago. Seventy-two years out of his element, he probably does stuff that looks stupid and dumb to the rest of them, but it still doesn’t explain why even his attempts at something akin to friendship—and that’s all he’s hoping for right now, he swears—are casually rebuffed.

_“Just to be clear, you and I have never had a moment. That was just you telling me a story about your very nice mom and…an orange.”_

_“What are you doing here?”_

_“Oh, I’m not part of the club? I’m sorry. I’ll just get my things, and I’ll go grab a cheeseburger…”_

The other problem is that it seems tragedy, world-shifting revelations, and apocalyptic events come in never-ending stream at S.H.I.E.L.D., so between Yo-Yo getting her arms chopped off, trying to seal off a monolith-created rift into a fear dimension, finding out the newly married Fitz and Simmons are his grandparents, and Fitz going full psycho and surgically restoring Daisy’s powers against her will, there isn’t a lot of time for bonding.

( _“And please be careful! Just because we keep putting ourselves in increasingly perilous situations, which is worrisome, and I just don’t want anything to happen to you…your…to your brains! ‘Cause they’re so smart that, we—we need those to survive.”_

_“Thanks, Deke.”_

_“They’re okay, right? Like, they’re gonna be—they’re gonna be fine?”_

_“They’ll figure it out. Have faith. Or a, you know, Xanax.”_ )

The revelation that he does still have family does astound him slightly, even if they don’t like him much. Nana and Bobo are _alive_ , and he was at their _wedding_ …

And then Coulson is abducted, and Deke watches as the weight of the directorship and everything else is placed squarely on Daisy’s shoulders, watches as she is consumed with a single-minded drive to find him. Deke tries to help, he does, but it’s hard to do when it’s not all together clear she wants his help in the first place.

Him being Deke, he ends up getting himself shot instead.

_(He leans heavily against her as they stumble toward the Quinjet, the confused and alarmed shouts of other team members fading into a cacophony of noise outside of his perception. There is only the fiery, agonizing pain of the bullet in his shoulder, and Daisy, kneeling beside him with her hands pressed to his wound, looking at him—really looking at him—for what seems like the first time…_

_“We got you, Deke. It’s okay. You’re gonna be okay.”)_

* * *

How dare he.

How dare he, and _it is happening again_.

She holds out the water and pills to him anyway, setting the bottle aside on a large munitions crate once he’s done as she chooses her next words with care. “That was reckless back there, Deke.”

His face, still overly pale except for the dark circles under his eyes, makes some approximation of a scoff. “You this kind to everybody who takes a bullet for you?”

She sticks to her guns anyway. He has to understand that this is not okay, that it can never happen again, that it was stupid and reckless and _she’s not worth it_. “You were the reason we had to retreat!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Deke balks. “Next time, I’ll try to keep all my blood inside of my body!”

Not for the first time, she wonders where his mark is that makes him want to protect her like this. In the same place as hers on his inner arm, or does he wear her brand somewhere else? The brand that slates him to die, because they _all_ do.

( _Unloveable_.)

“I had Hale’s daughter down for the count. We could’ve captured her.”

“Yeah, she was down, and I was trying to secure her weapon, like any other agent would have,” he says.

“You’re not an agent,” she shoots back.

“Oh, really? Well then, maybe you should stop ordering me around like one then,” Deke spits. “Because this top-dog thing doesn’t suit you.”

Daisy swallows down the way that stings, barely aware of the words she’s saying anymore, as long as he gets the message.

Stay away.

Don’t sacrifice yourself for me, because I am not worth it.

Stay the _fuck_ away.

“What does it matter if you don’t listen? I can’t fight and protect your dumb ass at the same time.”

“You are the worst,” Deke tells her. “I—I was trying to give you _backup_ —”

“I didn’t need your backup!” Daisy explodes. She never asked for that, she never asked for any of this…

_(“You can’t…you can’t just_ die _for me. It’s not fair.”)_

“—even though you threatened to kill me a couple of dozen times—” He breaks off, coughing, and she grabs him the water bottle anyway, holding it out to him even if despite her best efforts he doesn’t seem to _get it_ yet—

The coughing continues, thicker and wetter, and then blood is spattering the metal grating of the Zephyr’s floor. The water bottle falls from her hand, forgotten. “Deke? Deke!” Her hands press over his shaking shoulders, wracked with the spasms of the coughs. “We need help over here! Now!” His lips are painted red and his eyes wide and helpless and filled with pain and alarm as he slips downward, keeling over onto the floor. The mark on her upper arm seems to burn her skin, cutting through the fog of panic and uncertainty whirling around them.

( _“You are the_ worst _.”_ )

She’s done everything she can to push him away, and it might’ve even finally _worked_ , and she’s losing him for it anyway.

* * *

When he wakes up, the world is…strange. Mack’s there, and Piper too… He likes Mack. Mack is great, and big. Mack is—

“Welcome back.”

“You are on a lot of drugs,” Piper informs him. “But, hey, good news—you didn’t die.”

“Thank you,” he says, honestly delighted. Deke _likes_ not dying. Dying is scary, and stupid, and who needs that anyway? “You guys saved me.”

“Well, we’re just glad you pulled through,” Mack says.

He blinks at them, suddenly overcome with the feeling that someone is missing. Someone special. Someone—

“Is Daisy here?” he asks, head lolling slightly. “She’s so pretty…” She is. She _is_. Sometimes she makes his brain go all fuzzy when she walks in the room, all he wants to do is make her smile. Preferably at him, but also… “She’s my soulmate but I don’ think she knows.” They both stare at him. “Like, at all,” he impresses upon them.

“Wait…” Piper says. The world tilts slightly, making Piper’s image in front of him slant dangerously to the side, or maybe that’s just his head. “Daisy…is your soulmate.”

Deke nods. “Uh-huh.”

“And she doesn’t know?”

“Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p.’

Mack puts his head in his hands. “I am not paid enough for this.”

“I want to put my mouth on her mouth and move it around a lot,” Deke tells them, even if the room is doing weird loopy spins around him now, because for some reason it seems absolutely important for them to know. “But I don’t want to do that unless she wants to, too, ‘cause that’s what makes it nice. But I don’t think she wants that, ‘cause she does not like me one—”

And that’s where Deke’s memory of that day stops. It’s probably a good thing.

* * *

Daisy doesn’t visit Deke after Mack and Piper finish the surgery. In fact, she pretty much avoids that level of the Lighthouse altogether now that she knows he’s going to make a full recovery. They’ve got Fitz and Simmons and Yo-Yo still to find, and General Hale to deal with, and, well, maybe she also just doesn’t know what to say to him.

When she changes out of her sweat-and-snow-soaked uniform in her bunk, however, the words etched on her inner arm draw her eyes as soon as she has pulled her top off, the look of the sudden splotch of black ink still unfamiliar to her after twenty-nine years of blankness. The sight of them makes guilt and regret and maybe a bit of something else too swirl in her stomach, and she pulls on the first long-sleeved thing she can find as quickly as she can before heading out again to see if there’s been any update on the FitzSimmons-Yo-Yo front in the fifteen minutes she’s been away from Control.

“Daisy,” May says, catching her just as she leaves her room. A small crease appears on her brow. “Are you all right?”

“Mm-hmm, fine,” Daisy says. Her old S.O. gives her a look, then nods toward a more secluded corner of the already deserted hallway and heads for it, giving Daisy no choice except to follow.

“This about Coulson?” May asks, blunt as ever. “I’m sure Simmons will want to give him a full checkup once she gets back, but he doesn’t seem any worse for his hike through the taiga. As for his recklessness…I’ve already had words with him about that.”

“Bet that was fun,” Daisy says.

May studies her. “Or is this about your leadership? For the circumstances, you are doing exceptionally well, Daisy.”

She lets her head drop, examining the tiny stitches on the edge of her sleeve. “He said the same thing.”

“How proud we are of you is one of the few things Phil and I agree on right now,” May says calmly.

“Thanks.”

“So what’s really bothering you?” she probes. “What happened to Deke?”

Daisy opens her mouth, the lie ready on her tongue. She doesn’t want to talk about this; she doesn’t want to _think_ about this, not with any of the other horrible stuff going on or maybe not ever. It’s embarrassing, somehow, and deeply personal. Even if he wasn’t dying and in need of zero more of Daisy’s shit on his plate, she’s not sure she ever would have mentioned it to Coulson unless she had to. But this is May, and she’s overwhelmed and exhausted and maybe it’ll be nice to have this one terrible secret off her shoulders. After all, it can’t make it any _worse_ , right?

Her silence must answer her question anyway. “What happened to Deke was not your fault.”

Daisy swallows. “Yeah, except it was.” She takes a deep breath, staring up at the ceiling as if the gray cement can make the next words come any easier, to stop the tears from choking her. _Unloveable_. “He’s my soulmate, May.”

The woman’s shocked silence stretches on long enough that Daisy has to look at her. “Deke Shaw.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you didn’t have one.”

“So did I,” Daisy says, trying and failing not to let too much of her misery bleed into her voice. “It happened when we went to the future, I guess—”

“Because he hadn’t been born yet.” May crosses her arms, a far-off look in her eyes that tells Daisy she’s not done processing the information yet. That’s fair; Daisy’s not sure she’s finished processing it yet either, and it’s been weeks since she first discovered the mark on her arm. Fucking time travel.

“Yeah.” Daisy fixes her eyes on the ceiling again, sighs, and bangs her head against the wall with a little more force than absolutely necessary to make her point, even if the slight whine she adopts will probably do a good enough job already: “Why couldn’t it have been Tess?”

May pauses, staring at her, and Daisy feels an uncomfortable prickle and the sudden realization she might not have ever mentioned to May her bisexuality.

Oops.

But a second later, the woman only shrugs. “Tess was cute. Deke’s…got his own charms.”

Daisy groans in agreement, feeling absolutely pathetic. “Tess was at least _rational_. She never would have—”

“Jumped in front of a bullet for you?” May asks, deadpan. “Here at S.H.I.E.L.D., Daisy, we tend to consider that a good thing, if they save your life.”

“Well, it’s _not_ ,” Daisy says, crossing her arms.

“Bobbi and Hunter with Ward,” May lists off. “Fitz and Simmons under the ocean. Yo-Yo took a bullet for Mack when Hive’s Primitives attacked the base. And…”

She doesn’t even have to say it. “I don’t want another Lincoln,” Daisy says in a small voice. “I couldn’t stand it if—if it happens again.”

“You don’t get to choose who cares about you,” May tells her. “I told you that once about Coulson. I told it to him the other day. That’s a choice _we_ make.”

“I tried—I’ve tried to push him away.”

“And did it work?”

“I don’t know.” Daisy struggles to speak around the ever-expanding lump in her throat, choking her. “I doubt it.”

May sighs. “If you’re really not interested, then keep doing it. Maybe he’ll get the hint. Or, if you need, I can head him off for you.” Daisy has a sudden mental image of Deke cowering before May’s murder-stare and her lips quirk upward slightly in spite of herself. “But if any part of you is…”

Daisy wipes her eyes on her sleeve, sniffling a little. Before she knows what’s happening, May has wrapped her arms around her in a rare hug, and she melts into it, resting her chin on her former S.O.’s shoulder. “I just…” Her voice breaks a little. “Lincoln.”

May holds her tight for another few moments before letting go and stepping away, her hands clasped behind her back. “Lincoln didn’t sacrifice himself so you could cut yourself off from everyone and spend the rest of your life miserable, Daisy,” May says. “He sacrificed himself so you could _live_.”

* * *

“You’re in love with her.”

Everything inside Deke freezes, panic and an alarm that sounds suspiciously like the one for a coolant leak going off in his head. Nope. No. No no no no no. Feign disbelief. Feign disbelief, Deke!

“Sorry, what?” he asks, voice cracking on the third syllable. “No. Uh, no offense Mack, but I think your radar is _way_ misfiring on this one.”

“That was convincing,” Coulson says with a glance at Mack. “I believe him.”

“Thank you,” Deke says. His momentary relief is fleeting.

“You confessed, you idiot. When you were hopped up on painkillers. Piper and I couldn’t get you to shut up about it.”

“No, that’s— Okay, guys. What, you’ve never heard that drugs can make you say stuff that’s a little crazy? Maybe that’s why drugs are bad,” Deke insists.

“Your crush,” Coulson sighs. “It’s obvious. I figured it out a while ago.”

“It’s a little more than that,” Mack scoffs.

Coulson looks at him, vaguely uncomfortable. “Yeah, but ‘love’? That’s a strong word—”

“Well, Renew me for falling for literally the one person the universe picked out to be perfect for me,” Deke says, crossing his arms and glaring at the floor.

“Wait…”

“Oh, yeah,” Mack says with the air of someone who likes being the one to get to spill the pellets but doesn’t actually like the pellets themselves. “She’s also his soulmate.”

“Oh,” Coulson says as Deke determinedly avoids his gaze. “That…that changes things.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Deke mutters.

“Is—is it mutual?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Deke throws up his hands, daring them to tell him otherwise. “She hates me, anyway.”

“Well, I don’t know if…‘ _hate_ ’…” Coulson offers hesitantly.

Mack shrugs, looking almost sorry for him. “…It’s not great.”

He scuffs the ground with his foot. “I don’t even know how to tell her. You guys…” He looks at Coulson. “You and May are soulmates and have been together a while, right? How did that—”

“Actually, we, uh, aren’t,” Coulson says. “It’s complicated. We’ve been friends for twenty-one years and last Tuesday is the first time she told me she loved me.”

“She did? Oh, congratulations, man,” Mack tells him.

“She kinda yelled it at me, and it was really scary,” Coulson says. He turns back to Deke. “So, sorry bro, probably not the best person.”

“Mack?” Deke asks. “You and Yo-Yo’ve got a good thing going—”

“Don’t look at me either,” the big man says. “Last time I saw my soulmate, she lied to me, locked me up, and ran off with Fitz and Simmons.”

“Not a good day for soulmates all around,” Deke says. He sighs. “I guess it’s lemons, then.”

* * *

From his Google searches online with the tablet he borrows from Daisy, Deke knows that finding lemons in the town of River’s End should be simple as a mushroom pellet. Finding the time to go out and do that while with S.H.I.E.L.D., however, is questionable at best and probably wouldn’t have even been possible without the fact that Daisy put him strictly on the ‘DL’ in what was literally the only time she’s talked to him since he took a bullet for her.

Still, Daisy takes off again almost immediately after returning with Fitz, Simmons, and Yo-Yo, giving him plenty of time to drop the ten or twenty lemons he bought—okay, he went overboard a little, but still—on her bed and skedaddle before standing alone in her empty bunk makes him feel like too much of a creep.

(Deke definitely doesn’t notice, but it’s not like Daisy has much in the way of personal belongings there anyway, so hopefully it’s not too much of an invasion.)

His nerves over the eventuality of her finding said lemons is pushed to the back of his mind, however, as his time is consumed by working with his grandparents on getting the Zephyr outfitted for space flight, and that’s a roach-and-a-half even without the glaring fact that Fitz doesn’t seem to like him much, though Jemma has warmed to him. Then the aliens attack, because of course they do, and then he faces the prospect of being stuck in the Lighthouse for the rest of his life, because he is Deke Shaw and escaping this place was of course never in the cards for him. He does manage to save Fitz’s life along the way, though, so maybe there’s hope for him and Bobo yet, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. team pulls a last-minute save out of their asses in a way that he basically assumes is just normal for them at this point.

And then Daisy’s voice comes over the comms, and Deke knows his time has run out. “Lighthouse, is anyone there? Over.” Deke scrambles for the comms control. “Repeat, Lighthouse, this is Daisy Johnson. Does anyone copy?”

“Yeah, uh, we’re here, Daisy,” he says, grabbing it. “Sorry. We just had some technical difficulties.”

“Deke, thank god you’re there,” she says, and he’s just pathetic enough that her words send a surge of warmth through his chest. “I’ve been trying to get through for thirty minutes. I’m flying in.”

Fitz activates the in-lake landing pad for her as Deke starts to rush through the repairs to the last of the Lighthouse’s systems post-attack-by-Remorath. Still, it’s over a half an hour later before he can make his escape without raising Gramps’s eyebrows too much, but if he hurries maybe he can find her before she discovers the lemons. He’s starting to have a few doubts about that part of his plan.

“Where do you think you’re going?” May calls, catching him before he’s gone two feet down the hallway outside of Control.

“Oh, I was just, uh…” He makes a gesture in the air, one of his hands pointing vaguely in Daisy’s direction.

“I wouldn’t right now. She and Yo-Yo had a fight. They both need time to cool off.”

“Is she okay?” Deke asks immediately, nearly cutting her off in his haste. _Take it down 82%, Deke…_

“She’s fine.” May pauses, seems to consider him. He shuffles backward reflexively under her gaze. “Just…be careful.”

_“Be careful of what?”_ he wants to ask, but the woman is already striding away from him down the hallway.

Cryptic as usual.

Great.

He heads for Daisy’s bunk anyway, because he _does_ want to check if she’s okay. May cares for Daisy, he knows, but she’s not exactly warm and fuzzy. Plus…lemons. His footsteps slow as he approaches her open door, the light spilling from it confirming she’s inside. He approaches on silent feet, swallowing and gathering his courage and even doing something as stupid as checking his hair.

He’s just going to tell her about the soul-mark thing. And maybe how he feels.

No expectations.

Right.

Deke knocks on her door, wincing slightly at the way it sounds overly loud in his ears. Daisy looks up, tiredness deep in her eyes and her mouth a line of poorly-concealed unhappiness that she quickly tries to rectify. She doesn’t tell him to go away, though, so he takes that as his cue to step inside, his gaze falling to the large black duffel in the middle of her floor.

“What’s in the bag?”

She blinks, her lips pursing. “My…mom.”

“Oh…” Deke tries to process that for a few seconds, but it doesn’t quite compute and Daisy doesn’t exactly look like she wants to elaborate. He discards it, going back to why he came. “I heard about your little dust-up. I just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’ve been better?” Daisy offers. He edges a bit further into the room as she sighs. “It’s like the universe keeps reminding me that I should never have come back from the future. Also, some creep put a bunch of lemons on my bed as some weird sort of prank.”

Any warm feelings from earlier are immediately knocked out of him by that punch to the gut. Stupid Mack and Coulson, he never should have let them talk him into this.

He fumbles, faking a laugh. “Sounds like classic Fitz…” Her expression doesn’t shift, not even a hint of a smile. Just that same lost, untethered look. “Look, I, um…I feel like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. I, on the other hand, I—I lived in the Lighthouse my entire life, only to time travel into the past and still spend every single day of my life inside the freaking Lighthouse.” He swallows, hard, nearly choking on his own tongue. “So it’s like, even without Kasius around, this place just has this leash that keeps pulling me back in.”

Why is he talking about himself? Why isn’t he better at comforting his own freaking soulmate? Why—

“Well, I’m glad you stuck around,” Daisy tells him, something a bit softer in her gaze, “even if it’s a little crazy.”

His heart swells again, and it’s a little ridiculous how much of an effect she can have on him with so few words. “Well, maybe it’s not that crazy,” he tries, fighting past the thump-thump-thumping in his chest. He moves to perch across from her on the couch, hurrying to get the words out before he can second-guess himself. “I—I’ve been wanting to tell you something since we’ve gotten, you know, I don’t want to say ‘closer,’ but—”

Daisy makes a small noise deep in her throat, immediately looking down. “You really don’t. Everyone who gets close to me ends up dying.”

“Me, too,” he says. “And that’s why I feel like we have so much in common—”

“My mom.”

Deke blinks. “I—I know, and—and—”

“Lincoln.” The name is whispered but the crushed look on her face as she says it just kills him on the inside, a physical stabbing pain through his abdomen.

“…Who’s _Lincoln_?”

Daisy swallows, then looks up at him again. “Uh, Lincoln Campbell. He…he was the first Inhuman that I became close with. He fought at our side, and he—he died. He died for me, really.” He hears what she doesn’t say, a spaceship crashing in slow motion in his mind. The pile of lemons still on her bed mock him from the corner of his vision, but all he can really focus on is her pain, the resigned, broken tone of her voice. A wave of empathy sweeps through him, and in that moment, more than anything he’s ever wanted, he just wants her to be _okay_. “Right when we were getting going, or, you know, getting good.”

His own voice shakes slightly. “It sounds like you were really in love with this guy.”

“Kind of still am.” It hangs there for a moment, suspended between them. “Which is why I—I can’t lose someone else, and Coulson means more to me than anyone. And if he goes…”

“No,” Deke says, needing to reassure her despite the crushing weight that’s just been dumped on his chest. “No, no, no. We’ll—we’re gonna find a way to save him.”

It doesn’t really look like she believes him, but she scrubs her gray sleeve across her face anyway, visibly collecting herself. She turns back to face him, a little less haunted. “Sorry…you were gonna tell me something.”

Shit. He can’t now, and he doesn’t even want to. She’s already straining under the weight of so much, and Deke would rather die than add to her pain. “Yeah…” he says, searching, grasping for something else to say. “…Fitz-Simmons…are my grandparents.”

“What?” Daisy says, pure shock suffusing her face. “Wait, _what_?”

He bobs his head. “I know.”

“Are you serious?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Her mouth is still open slightly. It’s cute, her utter astonishment, and he hates himself a little for thinking it. “Do they know?”

“Yeah, yeah, cat’s totally out of the food sack,” he assures her.

“Oh, my God,” Daisy laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, nearly erasing the trauma of the last few minutes. “That makes so much sense. You and Fitz are both so—” She catches his eye. “You’re such special…people.”

He smiles; it doesn’t even feel like an insult, coming from her. “Yeah. Well, I, uh—just thought you should know.” He stands, eyes darting toward the bed with a sudden urge to just scoop them up in his arms and take the lemons with him, crazy as that would look.

“Thank you for telling me,” Daisy says, still vaguely—and delightedly—flabbergasted. “I needed that. I really did.”

He backs away toward the door. “Hey. Anytime.” He turns to leave when he reaches it, all too ready for his feet to carry him as far away from this entire situation as possible and maybe to a case of Zima if he can find it. If she needs him, he’ll be back in a heartbeat, he knows, but for now he just wants to bury himself somewhere, either in a pile of pillows—there’s no pillow rationing in this world, how cool is that?—or in his work with Fitz.

“Deke,” Daisy says from behind him just as he’s reached the door.

He turns around. “Yeah?”

Her face is somber again. “I…I know what you were really here to tell me.”

“You—you do?” Deke shakes his head. “No, no, that was it, I’m pretty sure—”

“Deke,” Daisy says, and hearing his name come out of her mouth shuts him up more than anything else. Her fingers play with the edge of her sleeve. “The mark. I have yours too. I—I didn’t realize it at first—” He scarcely dares breathe, feeling as if he is floating atop his body instead of inhabiting it. An hour ago, this confirmation would have been everything he wanted and more out of this conversation, but now… “—not until the deathmatch under Kasius, and then—”

“You don’t have to explain,” Deke murmurs. “I don’t—I didn’t—”

“Yeah, I kind of do,” Daisy says, making him fall silent again. “Because—because you have to understand that I’m—I’m unloveable. You can’t love me. It’s not safe, and anyone who does—”

“They die,” Deke whispers. His feet carry him back into the room of their own will, his hand shutting the door behind him for reasons he can’t fathom, except if they’re really going to do this, he doesn’t want it broadcast to half the base. “No, Daisy, you can’t believe that.”

“It’s true,” she says, tears sparkling in her eyes. “So, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your soulmate is broken, and I’m sorry that your mark is just a brand slating you to die if you don’t stay away, but it’s just…” She swallows, hard. “It’s just the way it is.”

“I don’t care,” Deke says. “That’s ridiculous, I still—”

She shakes her head. “You don’t get it. I’ve seen it happen, over and over. You—you—I’ve done everything I can to push you away and you’ve already _taken a bullet for me_!”

“You didn’t ask me to do that,” Deke splutters. “In no way was that your fault, Daisy!”

“You’re telling me you would have done that for anyone?” Daisy asks, a bit of fire blazing in her eyes now to match the challenge in her tone. “That if we weren’t—linked, or whatever, you would have disobeyed orders and ran back through the snow and put yourself in front of an assault rifle—”

“Yeah, I would’ve!”

“For Fitz and Simmons maybe, but…” She casts around for someone else. “Mack?”

“I love Mack! He’s awesome, and a great guy, so yes, I would have,” Deke argues, the words spilling from his mouth. “I would’ve done it for anyone on the team; I already did, remember? Big heroic sacrifice? But with you…” He swallows. “With you I wouldn’t even have had to think about it.”

She drops his gaze immediately. “And that’s the problem.”

His voice breaks a little, just above a whisper. “You’re not unloveable, Daisy.”

“Oh, really?” she asks, standing up to face him, the table and her mom’s duffel between them. “It’s only what I’ve been told my whole life. The nuns in the orphanage, the foster families. And anyone who’s tried to go against it has died. My mom, Lincoln, _Coulson_ …” She scrubs her sleeve across her face. “And what, is May next? You don’t get to just march in here and claim it’s not true just because you say it is, or because it makes you sad to think about, Deke. That’s not how life works.”

“And just because you were surrounded by shitty people and put through shitty situations doesn’t make it true!” he yells. He winces at the loudness, forcibly modulating his voice again. “You’re worth it, Daisy, and you don’t even know it. You’re kind and you’re smart and the universe has dealt you such a shit hand but you still care about people so fucking much! And that’s why you’re going to save Coulson. That’s why you’re going to be the one to save the _world_.”

A pregnant pause follows his pronouncement, and Daisy looks down. When she speaks, though, the fight has drained from her voice. “I think the title was actually _Destroyer_ of Worlds, Deke.”

“Well, whoever made that’s an idiot,” he tells her. “And anyone who’s ever said it obviously didn’t know you well enough yet.”

She inhales shakily. “…Thanks.”

“Plus,” he shrugs, “I’m pretty hard to kill. The Blues, the roach infestation when I was fourteen—that’s a crazy story—the explosion in the Lighthouse, all the stuff that’s happened since I got here… I mean, I’m still kicking.”

“Your mark, can I see it?” Daisy asks suddenly, moving toward him. “If—if it’s not in a, uh, uncomfortable place, or anything.”

“Um…sure,” Deke says, his mouth dry. She steps around the small table and the duffel bag as he tugs the side of his jacket down, exposing his collarbone. He forces himself to look away as she moves even closer, painfully aware of the proximity of her body to his. Her breath is warm as it ghosts over his collarbone, over the words—her words—imprinted on his skin. The silence stretches five seconds, then ten, but the tension in the room is far too thick to break it.

“So that’s why you wore that stupid brown scarf thing in the future,” Daisy says.

“What?” Deke asks, startled into looking at her. He twists so fast that their heads almost bump. “My scarf wasn’t stupid—what do you know about 2091 fashion anyway? It was _utilitarian_ —space dust is no joke.”

“Okay, okay,” Daisy says. Her breath catches slightly as she seems to realize exactly how close together they’re standing, but she doesn’t move away. He feels a bit drunk as their eyes finally meet. She bites her lip, but Deke is already lost in the deep, beautiful darkness of her eyes, slowly growing closer as he leans downward and she tilts her face up to meet him—

Reality crashes in and Deke stumbles backward. “I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “I didn’t mean to—you—Lincoln—”

“It’s okay,” Daisy whispers. “Lincoln…he didn’t sacrifice himself so I could be alone, forever. He would have wanted me to be happy.” She swallows. “You make me happy, Deke. I’ve been—I’ve been resisting it all this time, so I don’t know in what way, exactly, but you…make all of the horrible things seem less bad, when you’re around.”

“When I’m not taking a bullet for you, you mean,” Deke’s stupid mouth says before he can stop it.

“Yeah. Except then.” Daisy steps closer again, closing the distance his sudden backtrack had created between them. “Never again, Deke.”

He’s scarcely breathing. “Nope. I’m a one-bullet kind of guy.”

“I’m a little bit broken…” Daisy’s getting closer again, her eyes never leaving his. He feels like he’s drowning in them, with how much he wants this, but only—only if she does.

“Damaged guy, from a damaged world…” His heartbeat is rampant in his ears, so loud he can swear she must be able to hear it too. He can count every delicate eyelash, see the smudge of dark makeup underneath. She closes the rest of the space between them, her lips brushing ever so softly against his. Her hand rises to his jaw, tracing it lightly with her fingertips. Deke’s head is spinning; the kiss lights up his whole soul, sets the mark on his collarbone aflame, but soothes him, too. It’s like the last pieces that have been missing all his life are finally falling into place.

Time stutters to a start again when she pulls away, her eyes fluttering open to meet his. He dares to reach out and touch her hair like he’s wanted to since soon after they first met, drawing one dark, silky lock through his fingers. “That was…”

Daisy ducks her head. “Yeah.” She stands there for a few long moments, their bodies no longer touching but separated only by millimeters, before looking up at him again, her face serious. “I don’t know if I’m ready,” she warns him. “I might not ever be ready.” Deke, silent, nods his understanding. Daisy’s lips curve upward. “But I think I want to find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it, and any and all feedback is appreciated :)
> 
> Also, here's a bi flag edition of my Daisy drawing, because happy Pride!


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